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Expert: 7 Padilla fingerprints found on purported al-Qaida form

(AP) Seven fingerprints on a purported al-Qaida training camp application came back as matches to suspected terrorist operative Jose Padilla, a government expert testified Thursday.

But Secret Service fingerprint specialist John Morgan also acknowledged under defense questioning that there was no way to be certain when the fingerprints were placed on the “mujahedeen data form” recovered by the CIA in Afghanistan.

Defense lawyers theorize that Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, may have touched the form during his long military confinement at a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. He was held for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant before he was criminally indicted in Miami in late 2005.

Although the form was one of dozens found in a binder in late 2001, it wasn’t analyzed for Padilla’s fingerprints until August 2006, Morgan said. The fingerprints appear only on the front of the first page and back of the last page, possibly indicating that the form had been simply handed to Padilla at some point, defense lawyers say.

“Is it also possible that these prints were made by someone who was writing on the document?” asked prosecutor John Shipley.

“Yes, that is possible,” Morgan answered, adding that fingerprints are not always left behind when someone touches a paper. “It can go both ways.”

Prosecutors have opened the trial of Padilla and two co-defendants by focusing on the form, which they claim Padilla completed in July 2000 to attend the al-Farooq terrorist training camp. The form is critical because it potentially links the three defendants to al-Qaida as one of the Islamic extremist groups they are accused of conspiring to support.

A CIA officer testified this week that the form was taken in December 2001 to an agency installation in Kandahar, Afghanistan, by a local man who said he had found thousands of documents from what he believed was an al-Qaida safe house after its occupants fled. The binder containing the form was later turned over to the FBI.

The partially completed five-page form includes Padilla’s birth date, Oct. 18, 1970, and lists the nickname Abu Abdallah Al Muhajir, which prosecutors say was an alias for Padilla. The applicant wrote that he is a native speaker of English and Spanish with carpentry skills who studied Arabic and the Quran, made a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and traveled to Yemen “as a way to go through for Jihad.”

Also testifying Thursday was FBI translator Nancy Khouri, who said that whoever wrote the date on the form used a format most common in the United States month/date/year and identified himself as an American. The alias allegedly used by Padilla means “Abu Abdallah the Immigrant,” she said.

Khouri also said the form appeared to be filled out be someone not particularly fluent in Arabic.

“It looks like a kid’s handwriting,” she said.

Under defense questioning, Khouri confirmed that at least two types of ink appeared to be used on the form but said he could draw no conclusions from that. Defense lawyers claim the ink differences could mean some information was filled out at a different time.

Yahya Goba, a member of the “Lackawanna Six” group of men in upstate New York who pleaded guilty to terrorism support charges, is expected to testify in the Padilla case that he filled out an identical form for the same camp, but at a later date. Goba is serving a 10-year prison sentence and is cooperating with federal prosecutors.

Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen, was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on suspicion that he was part of an al-Qaida plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city. Those allegations are not part of the Miami indictment, which claims he was part of a North American support cell for Muslim radicals around the world.

Padilla was added to the existing Miami case in November 2005 during a legal battle over the president’s wartime powers to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens. He and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi face life in prison if convicted.